Abstract

The article sketches a short outline of the Italian Constitutional Court, by answering to two basic questions: what is its impact on political and social life in Italy and, accordingly, what this institution exactly is. My thesis is that the ideas of founding fathers of Italian Constitution on the judicial review of legislation are the best way to tackle these questions. Indeed, the vagueness of those ideas left the Constitutional Court quite free to decide purposes and means of its role in the political system - what it is the "secret" of its success. Moreover, the same indeterminacy explains why it is not so easy to give it a precise identity - if political or judicial, together to a certain inadequacy of conceptual tools used by political science and legal scholarship.